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Authors: J. N. Duncan

BOOK: The Lingering Dead
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“Can I help you?” the receptionist said with appropriately feigned politeness.
The woman, or perhaps she was a teen, Jackie could not tell for sure, stared in silence at Jackie for several more seconds before returning her blank stare to somewhere across the room.
“Excuse me. May I help you with something?”
Jackie cleared her throat and faced the receptionist, feeling that the ghost's gaze had most certainly returned to her. “Yeah, I'd like to speak with the chief or officer in charge, if I may.”
She gave Jackie a casual look-over. “Can I ask what this is pertaining to?”
Jackie's hand itched to reach for the badge. No authority whatsoever now. She was just Jackie Rutledge, Director of Special Investigations, Inc. It did not have the same ring to it.
“I'm a researcher from the University of Chicago, doing a project on ghosts, and—”
“Oh!” She looked at Jackie with wide-eyed surprise and then shook her head. “We don't have any ghosts around here. That's just a bunch of folklore phooey and nonsense drummed up to get tourists through here.”
Jackie shrugged and put on her best fake smile. “That may very well be the case, but I was actually wanting to ask the chief about something more law-enforcement related.”
The woman heaved a sigh. “Ah, well then. Chief Carson can probably answer that. Is there a problem?”
“No, no,” Jackie reassured. “It's just part of the research we're doing. Thatcher's Mill has some very peculiar crime rates compared to the surrounding areas, and with all the stories of ghosts around here, my team wanted to check it out.”
“You have a team?” Her brow wrinkled in confusion.
Jackie resisted the urge to roll her eyes. This was going so well. “Look, I don't want to waste the chief's time any more than I have to. I swear this won't take long.”
A door on the far side of the room behind the receptionist swung open. “Goddamn, Elinore. She'd be done asking her questions by now if you'd just hollered at me in the first place.”
“Sorry, Chief,” she said, attempting to look like she was actually doing something. “I figured you might be busy.”
He shook his head. “Busy listening to you gab.” He walked around her desk and put out his hand, a twisted, smarmy smile on his face. “Chief Carson. What can I do for you, Ms. Rutledge? Something about the Mill's crime rates?”
Jackie took the hand, pasty and clammy, in hers. He had to be in his fifties, given the thinned out strands of hair slicked back over his scalp and the paunch overhanging his belt. The pencil-thin mustache over his lip looked like it had been drawn on with makeup.
“Jackie Rutledge. And I'm glad to meet the local law for a town with the lowest crime rate in the world. You must be proud.”
Carson's hand dropped away, and the leering smile vanished. “Who'd you say you were with, Ms. Rutledge?”
“I didn't,” she said. “I'm leading a research team from the University of Chicago on incidents of paranormal activity in this region. Thatcher's Mill seems to have more than its share of ghost stories, but little in the way of crimes to account for their source. Our research put your town on the top of our list. So”—she waved her hand across the room, turning to see if the young woman was still sitting on the bench. She still sat there, staring straight through her—“we're here, trying to make sense of our data.”
It sounded like good bullshit. She was going to have to get everyone on the same page about just what the hell they were doing in the town. Conflicting stories would only make these folk more suspicious.
Carson thrust his hands into his pockets. “And what data is that?”
“From what we could find, there hasn't been a homicide in this town as far back as we can look up records, not even an assault,” Jackie said, carefully watching his face for reactions. “That just seems to defy the odds, so I was hoping you might be able to clue me in as to what the story is here.”
“Story?” His mouth worked in silence for a moment, making the mustache look like a worm crawling across his face. “No story, really. We're just peaceful folk around here, and I run a tight ship. Folk here know the law and like to keep things ... peaceful.”
“What about the chief before you?” Jackie asked. “He ran things just as tightly as you do?”
He laughed, his belly jiggling atop his belt. “If anything, Ms. Rutledge, my father ran things tighter than I do now, and his father before him.”
That explained the conspiracy of cover-up, if there indeed was one. “So, there hasn't ever been an actual murder in this town as far back as you know of?”
“That's right,” he said, taking a step closer to her, pushing the edges of her personal space. “We're good folk here, who look after each other and mind their own business.”
Jackie stood her ground and smiled with no fake friendliness this time. “If I didn't know better, Chief Carson, I'd say you were warning me off.”
The wormy smile broadened into a gap-toothed grin. “Just saying, Ms. Rutledge. Folk don't take much to having strangers digging into their business. Your—team is it?—is likely better off moving on to the next town and not wasting your time.”
“I see,” Jackie said.
Smarmy little shit.
“Well, I'll take your advice up with my team and see what they have to say. We wouldn't want to be upsetting the fine folk of Thatcher's Mill.”
“You seem like a smart girl, Ms. Rutledge. I'm sure they'll listen.”
And why don't you just say, “Get the hell out of my town,” you pasty coward?
“Thanks for your time, Chief. Have a good day.”
Jackie spun on her heel and stepped toward the door, catching the young woman sitting on the bench out of the corner of her eye. She had not moved, but her shadowed, lifeless eyes followed her out.
Chapter 8
Nick slapped down a ten-dollar bill on the counter. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Pratt.” He took another sip from the cream soda made by the drug store's old-fashioned soda fountain. “I haven't had a soda this good in years.” He turned and walked away, while the elderly gentleman, wearing an apron with his name inscribed on the front, swiped the bill up off of the counter.
“It's a two-dollar drink, Mr. Anderson,” he said.
“Keep the change, worth every penny.” Nick stepped through the jingling door and stood beneath the awning, watching a light rain soak the pavement. That was now the third person to lie about the ghosts of Thatcher's Mill, every one of which had hurried away from his presence. The ghosts had been more than wary. They had wanted nothing to do with him.
He pulled out his cell and hit the button for Shelby, while surveying the street. The diner on the corner across from him catered to a handful of locals. To his right, a dairy truck rolled by on the main highway, water spraying up from its tires. To the left, Thatcher's Mill Road stretched off to the east, leading to the edge of the town some four blocks away. There, a drive, shrouded in a stand of oak and maple, wound up the hill, where a plume of smoke dissipated into the low rolling gloom of the sky from a brick chimney barely visible across the tops of the trees.
“Any luck, babe?” Shelby asked.
“I haven't been able to get a single spirit to stick around long enough to chat,” he replied. “And I just got lied to about them for the third time in three tries. Something is very off with this place.”
Her sarcastic bark of laughter rang in his ear. “Gee, you think? Same problem here. I just about decked the cranky old fuck at the hardware store. I swear, if I hear one more person call me ‘Missy' again, I'll scream.”
Nick slurped down the last of his cream soda, dropped it in the trash can outside the door, and began to walk east. What was so familiar about this town? He had done more than just pass through here so many years ago. Every corner and building gave him a twinge of déjà vu. He had roamed these streets, lingered in this little town for more than his usual night before moving along the path in his quest for Drake.
“Nick?”
“Yeah?”
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just trying to remember why I was here a century ago. It's all a blur, but I stopped here when I was on Drake's trail.”
“You stopped in a thousand little backwater towns,” she said. “How are you supposed to remember every damn one of them?”
“I know, but there was something else here. I stayed here, maybe for only a day or two longer than usual, but there was a reason. I just can't remember what it was, damn it all.”
“You're just getting old, babe.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Don't get morose on me, cowboy,” Shelby snapped back. “I hate when you brood. Don't worry. Jackie will come around. Just give her some time.”
Nick sighed. “I wasn't even thinking about that.”
Not actively at least, but thanks for bringing that up.
“You should be,” she said. “Give her space, but don't let her go. She needs you.”
“Yes, Mother Meddlesome. Now how about butting out for a while and focusing on the task at hand. I'll be back at the diner in ten minutes.”
“OK, I'm almost there. Cyn and Jackie are already waiting.”
“Good,” Nick said. “You all can plan our wedding.” He clicked off before she could reply and shoved the phone back into his pocket. Getting the last word in with her was one of the small pleasures in life.
But it was a poison pill, of course, as the thought brought up actual images in his head of being married to the small, feisty woman who rode into town on her own personal baggage train. The notes of their piano duet echoed in his mind, and that continually fleeting look of almost happiness on her face, when her eyes opened from their perpetual gloom and lit up with the spark of life, a spark he had ignited. If only there weren't so many things in the way that kept it from catching fire and coming to life.
Nick stopped at the end of the road, where two brick posts marked the edge of the drive winding up the hill. A metal placard on one read simply T
HATCHER'S
M
ILL.
He closed his eyes against the spattering rain and caught the faint whiff of smoke drifting down upon the wind. It was a town where the dead fled and the living wanted nothing to do with him. Just like ...
His eyes snapped open. She wanted nothing to do with him. Over a hundred years ago, on this very hill, in that very house hidden among the trees, a young woman had wanted nothing to do with him. Yes, he remembered now. Thatcher's Mill flooded up from the depths of Nick's memory.
 
 
The mare came to an uneasy stop, her shoes clopping hollowly on the wooden planks of the bridge. The welcome sign read T
HATCHER'S
M
ILL.
Nick leaned over and patted the mare's neck. “Easy, girl. I can feel him, too.”
His stomach grumbled. It had been a long, hard two days' ride up along the Mississippi, following Drake's trail. Worse, it had been nearly two days since he had drank any blood. He needed to find someone suitable soon. With a little more coaxing, he nudged the horse back into motion and trotted back onto the muddy road leading into town.
The taint of Drake was the strongest he had felt in months. Not since Kansas City, when he had actually spotted him at the train station but had been too late to board the train. The feeling did not have quite that potency, but he had been here, perhaps just hours before. Even the steady drizzle could not wash away the stench of that man.
Not surprisingly, the town looked empty. Shutters were closed, lamps were extinguished, curtains were drawn, and doors were shut. People were hiding. Nick knew that feeling all too well. It also meant the law had fled from or been killed by Drake. He had stamped his indelible mark of blood upon this place. In the center of town, at the single crossroad, he had a drugstore, saloon, feed store, and the sheriff's to choose from. Nick rode over to the sheriff's and swung off the horse, tying her loosely to the hitching post out front.
Once under the eave, Nick removed his hat and shook the water from it before stepping inside. The single jail cell was empty, as was the rest of the sparsely furnished room. A six-slot gun case on the wall behind the desk was missing two rifles. A town full of holed up folk and a missing sheriff. The situation did not bode well at all. In the stillness of the room, Nick pondered his next move when his overly sensitive hearing caught the faint sound of a wail. It was more a scream of anguish, immediately knotting up his stomach. He had heard that familiar cry far too many times in his thirty years of crisscrossing the country in his endless pursuit of Cornelius Drake. It was the keen of sorrow, the howl of loss for the dead.
Back on his horse, Nick made his way east, past the glass storefront of the drugstore, splashing his way up the rutted road toward the edge of a tree-covered hill that overlooked the town. He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, a face poking through a pulled-back, lace curtain in the window of a sod-covered house. The look was one of curiosity and fear.
Through the trees, he could see the house, built in a clearing partway up the hill. There was a millhouse off to its right, fed by the stream he had crossed coming into town. Every step increased that sense of death he had felt upon entering the town.
The scream echoed down through the trees to him once again, fading into sobs, the sound of a girl or young woman full of mourning and rage. Nick urged the mare up the hill.
Two hundred yards up the road, the trees thinned to reveal a wide clearing. There, a sturdy farmhouse had been built, whitewashed with green shutters on the windows. Here was the money of the town, the Thatchers if Nick were to hazard a guess. On the far side of the clearing was the mill, where he could see the waterwheel churning slowly with the current of the stream. In front of the door, a body lay sprawled in the mud, unmoving. Halted in the center, surveying the scene, Nick caught the unmistakable, muffled sound of a rifle being cocked. From the broken front window, he watched the dark steel of the barrel slide across the sash, pointed in his direction.
“Ma'am?” Nick called out. “I'm U.S. Marshal Nicholas Anderson. You needn't fear me. I mean you no harm. I come to offer my—”
A flash exploded from the barrel of the rifle and Nick flinched. The mare jumped, rearing back and nearly dumping him onto the ground. Before she could spook any further, he dismounted and grabbed the reins, keeping the horse between him and the window just in case.
“Ma'am, are you hurt? Does anyone need medical attention?”
“They're all dead!” a young, female voice cried out. “He killed them all. What are you doing here?”
Nick slowly walked his horse toward the front door. “Ma'am, what is your name?” He kept a careful eye on the rifle barrel that followed his every move. It shook with unsteady hands. The last thing he wanted was to get shot from an anxious squeeze of the trigger.
“Charlotte,” she said. “Charlotte Thatcher.”
“Are you hurt, Charlotte?
The gun sagged, tipping the barrel toward the sky. “I don't know. There's ... there's so much blood.”
Nick stopped several feet from the door. He was close enough now to see that the girl was no longer peering out the window. “I'm coming in, Charlotte. I'm here to help.” He was met with the sound of choked sobbing. Nick tied off the mare and stepped up onto the porch. The front door was ajar. After easing the door open, he peered around the door jam and saw Charlotte sitting on the floor, face buried in her hands, her slight body shaking with the force of it.
Add another name to the list of people torn apart and ruined by the man he could not stop.
She was barefoot, her spun-wool dress ripped open halfway down the front. The white lace of the collar had been stained the rusty-red color of blood. Her hands were smeared with it. Strands of matted hair fell around her face.
Nick knelt down next to her. “Charlotte,” he said quietly. “Let me see if he's hurt you.”
When his fingers brushed her arm, Charlotte's hands dropped away, her eyes wide and blind with terror. She scrambled away from him, one hand instinctively clutching at her torn dress. “No, no! Stay away. You stay away from me.”
Squatted down on his toes, Nick paused, saying nothing until those wild eyes refocused. “Charlotte. I need to see if you're bleeding.” Finally she nodded, and Nick scooted closer, offering his hand to her until she took it. The slender fingers were buried in his and he held it firmly, trying to reassure her, while the other pushed up the sleeve of her dress, to check her arm, and then prodding and squeezing gently to check for broken bones and lacerations. Other than a small cut over her left eye, Charlotte appeared to be unharmed physically, unless Drake had forced himself upon her as well, but Nick was not about to pursue that avenue at this moment.
“All right, Charlotte,” Nick said. “Let's get you over to that sofa, and cleaned up a bit. Would you like some water?”
When he released her hand, Charlotte latched onto his with both of hers. “Everyone is dead. Nobody stopped him.”
Nick pulled her up and guided her over to the sofa. “I know. He's an evil man, Charlotte.” After she sagged back against the cushion, Nick sat down in the chair next to her. “Where are your parents? Are they here in the house?”
She nodded, sniffled, and pointed at the staircase. “They're dead.”
Nick already knew. This was not the first time Drake had left a lone survivor for him to find. “Is there anyone else? Brothers? Sisters? Hired help?”
Charlotte blinked at him in silence, eyes pooling with tears, and then she looked down to her lap, where one hand picked absently at the fingernails of the other. The tears began to drop one by one onto her dress. “Becca.”
“Is that your sister?”
The hand continued to pick while the tears soaked into the wool. “Not no more.” She looked back up at him, despair and incomprehension molding her face. “Nobody tried.” Charlotte's voice crumbled. “I didn't ... know ...”—she shrugged, lip quivering, and wiped at her running nose—“what to do.”
Nick picked up a blanket from off the shelf beneath the couch's end table and unfolded it, draping it over Charlotte's legs. “Stay right here, Charlotte. Can you do that? I want to have a look around and see if anyone is still alive.”
Charlotte nodded and reached out toward his face until her fingers brushed across his cheek and then fell back to her lap. “Becca's dead.”
He patted her knee and stood up. “I'm sorry, Charlotte. Truly, I am.”
The mother was in the pantry, her head barely attached to her body thanks to a severe slice to the throat. Blood had sprayed across the wall and floor. Why he simply shot some victims and at other times rended the flesh from their bodies, Nick still did not fathom. He suspected that those who were reminders of something from his past inspired this insane kind of blood lust. Nick had stopped trying to decipher the meaning long ago. The man was smart enough to know what he was doing and never followed any kind of discernible pattern.

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